Voda fails again: network melts in Melbourne heatwave

Vodafone is once again apologising to customers after an air-conditioner wilted as Melbourne temperatures hovered just under 40°C yesterday.

That outage, in the company’s Tullamarine switch, flattened services for as many as half of its Melbourne customers, reaching out to impact as much as 15 percent of its traffic nationally.

At the time, one Vodafone customer has told Vulture South, text messages were also being held up by as much as an hour.

The outage first took hold shortly before 8:00 PM on Thursday, November 29, and continued well into the night. The Register’s informant said that at 10:00PM, outgoing services were “sporadic” and incoming calls were failing entirely.

This is in close agreement with a report by Fairfax, which states that Vodafone only made a public acknowledgement of the outage at 10.30PM, and at 11.45PM said that services were “beginning to be restored”.

That post included the distinctly IT Crowd-like suggestion that customers reboot their phones to access the network (of course, if you were trying to find out what’s going on using a smartphone connected to a network that’s not working, you might never know that the advice was given).

Unsurprisingly, the company’s “we apologise for the inconvenience” on Facebook has been met with fury by probably-soon-to-be-former customers. ®